Tag Archives: Grant McLennan

‘His father’s watch
He left it in the shower
From time to time the waste – memory wastes’

A single that to my great and enduring shame cost me nothing. I happened to be round at my friend Robert’s house while he was sorting through his record collection, deciding what he could part with to raise some much needed cash (this being not long after our student days). He’d recently had his head turned by Talk Talk’s Laughing stock and was more quickly making his way into stretched-out avant-garde jazz and electronica than I was. So when I voiced incredulity that he was parting with it, and that I’d have it if he didn’t want it, I guess I gave him no choice. Rob being Rob, he wouldn’t take any money for it – that is, if I offered him any; my memory’s somewhat shaky on that point.

From its intro onwards, the song echoes down the years like the memories remembered within it. ‘And the waste – memory wastes…’ sings Grant McLennan, poetically and clinically crystallising with that play on words what it is about recollecting our pasts – and in particular our childhoods – that is so affecting. There’s a performance of the song on the That striped sunlight sound DVD, and in the context of Grant’s death the following year, it’s heart-breakingly poignant. Grant’s not properly miked, so you have to strain a little to hear his vocal, but to see them playing this truly great song in the living room of one or the other of them, Robert Forster relaxed and urbane, Grant wry and ever so slightly on edge – to see the depth of their understanding and mutual admiration – well, it’s testament to a great friendship and a great band. Faced with the first song of Grant’s to best his own efforts, Robert describes his epiphany: ‘He’d done childhood… why didn’t I think of that?’

Until I read David Nichols’ excellent book about the Go-Betweens, it had always seemed something of a mystery to me as to why Grant would allow Robert lyrical room within one of his most personal, deeply felt and memorable songs. Here’s how Grant, speaking to Virginia Moncrieff in 1983, explains it:

‘I don’t like the word nostalgic, to me it’s a sloppy yearning for the past, and I’m not trying to do that in that song. I’m just trying to put three vignettes of a person, who’s a lot like myself, growing up in Queensland, and just juxtaposing that against how I am now, and that’s the reason why at the end of the song I asked Robert to do four lines, of his impressions, of me and what the song’s about, and that’s why his voice comes in at the end of the song.’

So the singing of the song is not just a telling of the memories of childhood, but a sharing of them, and sharing leads to conversation, and Robert chips in with what he recalls, and it serves to give the song still more emotional weight, and to induce you to remember your own childhood, your relationship with your own father, and to want to share that too.

I recall… the week he came back, the house was filled with unfamiliar smells, it had been so long. In the mornings, aftershave and marmalade on toast. In the evenings, cigarettes extinguished in the toilet and whisky and dry. It seemed a miracle that he was there at all, given all the previous, the fortnightly Saturday afternoon wrangles. It lasted no longer than a week…

In one of the vignettes, Grant famously sings about leaving his father’s watch in the shower. The early death of his father is the unspoken and haunting subtext of the song (and of another song on Before Hollywood, ‘Dusty in here’), and the heft of its sadness has only broadened as a result of Grant’s own early death. But it’s not simply a sorrowful song; there’s warmth in there too, which adds to its unique and enduring appeal. Written in London on Nick Cave’s guitar in 1982, it forcibly brought Australia to mind for its writer. As he says on That striped sunlight sound, ‘it carried sunshine in it’.

PS Rob, if you’d like the record back, it’s yours the next time we meet up. Might be worth a bob or two more now.

There are two presents I would like for Christmas. The first is a McLennan Monkees t-shirt. The second is a copy of Robert Forster’s book, The 10 rules of rock and roll, which collects together the music criticism previously discussed here. There’s a new piece in the book called ‘The 10 rules’. That I can’t wait to read – the 10 rules in the opinion of the man who wrote ‘Rock’n’roll friend’.

In other Go-Betweens news, brought to us by the ever dependable Go-Betweens.net, the group are having a bridge named after them in their home town of Brisbane. It’s called the Go Between Bridge. Not the Go-Betweens Bridge plural, but Go Between singular. More of a referencing bridge than one named explicitly after them, I suppose.

This post is also an excuse to post the cover of one of my most cherished CDs. The Go-Betweens, Robert Foster, Grant Mc Lennan & me was given away as a cover-mount CD with French music magazine Les Inrockuptibles in 1991, and comprises six songs by the group, and three each from Grant and Robert’s first solo LPs. It doesn’t have anything a Go-Betweens nut wouldn’t have these days but at the time the remixed, alternate version of ‘Head full of steam’ was notable for the extra lines that Robert sings: ‘Steam may rise, steam may dare / Can I come to your place, and can I wash your hair?’

And it would be a dereliction of duty not to point you in the direction of a later Go-Betweens CD for Les Inrocks, which gave the French-speaking world a chance to hear acoustic demos for 16 Lovers Lane. These didn’t make it onto the enhanced version of the album released by Lo-Max Records in 2004, so I’m guessing that if you’re a fan, you’ll want to head down under and visit our friends at That striped sunlight sound.

Just about living up to my promise of spending more time in the 21st century, here’s an edited version of my review of the Go-Betweens’ The friends of Rachel Worth, which mysteriously disappeared from the Tangents archive (probably during one of Alistair’s well-documented technological meltdowns). It was one of our three-way jobs, but the other two have also sadly fallen down a virtual crack as well.

NB I actually quite like Sleater-Kinney these days.

Before hearing The friends of Rachel Worth, I confidently predicted to a friend that Sleater-Kinney’s involvement would not have a detrimental effect on the album. He raised a large eyebrow, the very soul of scepticism. Never to my knowledge having heard Sleater-Kinney, it was a rash thing to say, but showed at least my faith in Robert and Grant’s judgement. On the first few listens, I was ready to concede that he was right. It seemed that just about any of the musicians Robert and Grant have worked with since the group raised a headstone to themselves in 1990 would have helped create an album more characteristic of the Go-Betweens. I thought that the reminders of Pavement – or does it all go back to Sonic Youth? – in what I take to be Sleater-Kinney-influenced elements of the sound was unfortunate. I don’t mind Pavement, you understand, I just didn’t want to hear echoes of them on a Go-Betweens record. It makes for jarring images in a familiar landscape; maples among the eucalypts.

In any case, it’s not a comeback, because they never really went away. Each have turned in fine solo efforts since 1990. I’m particularly fond of Robert’s Warm nights, with its aura of straight roads, motels and diners. This is a reunification, a resurrection of an identity Grant and Robert have carried with them throughout their solo years. Here are two well-travelled musicians, with influences from across the Western world, who have forged their own sound in records made on three continents. By fourth or fifth listen, the jarring images have faded into the background, and the opening twangs of ‘Magic in here’ start to resemble nothing so much as the Go-Betweens themselves. Further in, there are echoes of the Able Label singles, and of Before Hollywood rock’n’roll toughness, and perhaps that’s what the well-intentioned young American helpers were encouraged to evoke. Having been bowled over by their performances as a duo last year, I was hoping that Grant and Robert would use this chance to go or stay acoustic. But the temptation of being a band again must have been too strong, and since this is an album which is as at ease with itself as 16 Lovers Lane, I can’t complain.

I read that they were drama students. I never knew that, although Robert’s desperate pelvic banging of the podium on which Lindy Morrison sat drumming during a rendition of ‘Draining the pool for you’ at the Astoria in 1986 told you all you needed to know on that score. It shows in Grant’s approach too, comparatively and characteristically understated as ever. His knack for storytelling and his understanding of the weight a small detail can carry is that of a dramatic poet.

Both offer songs which could easily have been written when they were starting out. A goofy optimism combines with typical dryness on Robert’s ‘Surfing magazines’, as ephemeral as its title suggests, while Grant’s ‘Going blind’ is effortlessly pop, alarmingly sing-along. More often than not, the prevailing wind is the familiar one, the heartfelt reflection on loss and the past that also permeates the novel from which they take their name. ‘Orpheus Beach’, for example, immediately joins the ranks of bruised McLennan classics, with its yearning chorus and brooding verse.

The best Go-Betweens albums have stood the test of time as well as any made in the 1980s. Through the nineties, the memory of the majority of their peers faded while Grant and Robert’s music continued to remind us what evocative, pin-sharp song writing there could be, if only good hearts were married to individual minds. The friends of Rachel Worth has ten gems of the Forster-McLennan variety, songs I expect to find endlessly fascinating, with an edge that once again ensures the Go-Betweens dip their collective chest to win at the line.

Don’t know about you, but I’ve always got the information most important to my health from Forster and McLennan. And their longevity certainly makes it meaningful to talk about them in the context of a changing socio-technical landscape… I like to think that one of the editors was up against a wager that she couldn’t get the name of her favourite group into a book title.

While we’re on the subject, there’s a great version of ‘Right here’ from the Barbican show in 2004 downloadable from the Go-Betweens’ library, strings and all. You can also pick up ‘He lives my life’ from the same night there, though owners of the double CD edition of Oceans apart will have that already. I wrote about that night in a somewhat uneven fashion for Tangents, but at least I got one thing right:

‘The consistency of their song-writing as a pair is staggering. Every song has something about it that lifts it far above the ordinary: a sun-dappled pop melody, a lyric you might like for your gravestone or your screensaver, a guitar figure which illustrates exactly what music means to you, time shifts which make you want to take up drumming, a chorus that fills your heart, instrumental shading that fills your eyes. Frequently their songs have all of these, and more.’

The best piece that Robert Forster has penned for the Monthly is ‘A true hipster’, about his friend and song writing partner Grant McLennan. But there’s also this Sunday Times piece which appeared around the time that The evangelist was released – Robert on how he finished off the songs that Grant left behind.

Apologies for trying to set the record for the greatest number of post titles utilising Go-Betweens songs, but The Clientele’s cover of ‘Orpheus beach’ can now be heard on the Rare victory tribute to Grant McLennan site (as previously mentioned here).

You might also want to get yourself over to Bradley’s Almanac, where the full Clientele set from Boston Museum of Fine Arts earlier this year is available with a quality of sound that anyone who’s seen them in London will not be entirely used to. On the subject of covers, there’s a great, concise rendering of Television’s ‘The fire’ for one of the encores.

At best, tribute albums are hit and miss; at their worst they are a train-wreck of cherished songs, carriage after calamitously mauled carriage. I’m hoping that when Love goes on! A tribute to Grant McLennan appears, it has at least some selective repeat play potential. The Clientele will tackle ‘Orpheus beach’, while Paul Handyside of Hurrah! is attempting – with greater inherent risk – ‘Bachelor kisses’. No-one appears to have been brave or foolhardy enough as yet to take on ‘Cattle and cane’, but I guess there’s still time for someone to entertain us with that error of judgement. On the Rare Victory site you can hear what the Orchids have made of ‘Magic in here’ and no less than five competing versions of ‘Love goes on’, the winner being Private Eleanor, although I think the Bank Holidays can count themselves unlucky. Best of all on current display is ‘The Devil’s eye’ as performed by GB3 and Angie Hart. GB is Glenn Bennie who recorded with Grant in the year before he died, while Angie Hart was the singer in Frente! who worked similar magic on New Order’s ‘Bizarre love triangle’ back in 1994. The timbre of her voice is not unlike Grant’s and yet of course it has the advantage over the male interpreter of bringing something other to the song. Couple this with her perfectly judged phrasing and you have a cover that even the Clientele may struggle to better.

‘I read about your death in the paper, when I was buying tomato seed’. It’s hard not to turn a lyric like this in on its singer when you know he’s gone. Grant McLennan’s songs often suggested an unusually acute awareness of mortality, but he always threaded them with what it meant to be alive. ‘Been waking up early on Sundays watching my soil breathe.’

Intermission: the best of the solo recordings 1990-1997 is the result of Robert Forster and Grant hand-picking a baker’s dozen songs each from four times that number. The character of each disc is striking – if you knew nothing of Robert and Grant, you would never guess from this evidence that they grew up in the same group. Of course, those characters were already long-developed and contrasting by the time the first phase of the Go-Betweens came to an end, but the bond then was stronger than the difference, so that one could easily drop a vocal into the other’s song.

Had the solo works been songs on four extra Go-Betweens albums, Robert’s might have been softened and harmonised by Grant’s presence. Owing to Robert’s greater editorial and conceptual clarity, Grant’s songs could have been more focused, less affected by the sheen of a commercial production. I think Robert survived better than Grant as a former Go-Between, allowing looser inflections of country and country rock to infiltrate his music, and each album (bar the less than successful covers set) has a distinct feel. But throughout his attempts to produce the perfect song for FM radio, Grant retained his poetic sensibility, mourning the fragility of love, or celebrating its greatness and perfection.

Will Robert go on to make more solo records, inspired rather than haunted by the memory of his friend and foil? The signs are that he will. Meanwhile, he has become a prize-winning critic in Australia, writing about Dylan and the Shins for the Monthly, which also published his tribute to Grant, ‘A true hipster’ two months after McLennan’s death in May 2006. In it Robert says that when they met he was ‘falling into music’, while Grant’s obsession was film. ‘We became Godard and Truffaut. Brisbane didn’t know it at the time, but there were two 19-year-olds driving around in a car who thought they were French film directors.’

The ‘acoustic stories’ part of the That striped sunlight sound DVD also illuminates their partnership, with conversation between the pair and great untreated versions of some of their best songs. Grant begins to lose his voice halfway through the session, recorded the day after the Brisbane show also filmed for the disc. You feel for him, a man forever stretching, yearning, reaching for artistic highs and heights. A man very much alive.

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Today…

‘Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration – that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There's no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we're the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the weather.’ – Bill Hicks